Second Sunday after Christmas (B) – January 4, 2009 - "Collateral Damage"
Matthew 3:13-15 (16-19) 20-23
St. Giles Church, Northbrook IL – The Rev. Cynthia J. Hallas
In spite of the decorations that remain here in the nave it’s easy to assume that the holidays are over. School starts back tomorrow for most students, some of us even went back to work this past Friday, and when I wished “Happy New Year” to some folks I encountered on the 2nd of January, they looked at me as if to say “Happy New Year? That’s so yesterday!”
And then we begin our liturgy, and discover that in fact, Jesus is still a baby. The heavenly host of angelic choirs have departed, the shepherds have gone back to their flocks, and today as we pick up the story we discover that the wise men have left the building. But there is one more episode in the infancy narrative in Matthew’s gospel, one more aspect of the wise men’s story that remains to be told.
We know all about the gifts, and the long star-guided journey to see the one born “King of the Jews”, but we sometimes forget that these wise men have been unwittingly recruited as spies for King Herod, who has attempted to trick them into revealing the location of this tiny baby NOT so that he can ‘go and worship him’ as Herod says, but because as a supposed rival to his political power, the wretched king wants the infant destroyed. But thanks once again to the ever popular ‘warning-in-a-dream’ (something God appears to be very good at), they have managed to avoid Herod’s treachery by heading ‘home by another way’ and thus not reporting back to the palace to reveal the child’s whereabouts. So it might appear that the young one is safe.
Then we hear about the angel’s visit to Joseph warning him about Herod’s still-credible threat to kill the infant; we hear about the flight into Egypt (where, I’m told, a Jewish diaspora might well have welcomed and supported the holy family in Alexandria); and we hear about, but usually pay much less attention to, the family’s eventual return trip, not back to Judea but rather to Nazareth.
The flight into Egypt is probably the final installment of this portion of the story that still has the power to capture our imaginations: the delicate young mother riding the donkey as she cradles the babe in her arms; the stalwart, faithful Joseph leading the way, usually under cover of darkness across a beautiful, peaceful, moon-washed desert. They’re traveling light; after all, they were fugitives, and they had left their home hurriedly. The prophetic gifts of the wise men are not mentioned again, but their symbolism speaks volumes: gold that hinted at the birth of a king; incense that signified divinity; myrrh that foretold death and the grave, but not yet.
We know why the family is fleeing, but the story is not complete if we don’t know what happens in the little town they’ve left behind. Herod’s legacy is much more far-reaching and frightening than simply forcing one family to flee its home, and his rage at being duped is all-encompassing. You may have noticed from the citation in your bulletins that a section of the gospel is missing from our reading this morning –– verses that tell of the horror than ensues following the family’s departure into Egypt. These four verses are difficult to hear, but certainly no more difficult than news reports from the last several weeks, or the last several years, or history lessons from the recent or ancient past.
These are the verses that are missing from the middle of the third chapter of Matthew’s gospel:
16When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. 17Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: 18“A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”
This act by King Herod has become known as the slaughter of the innocents; these young children are remembered in the church calendar of saints on December 28 as “The Holy Innocents”. They are the very first martyrs of the Church, giving their lives for the sake of the very young Christ, albeit unintentionally. As the holy family continues its journey, they are probably not aware of the blood flowing in the streets of Bethlehem, the cries of infants and the babbling of toddlers suddenly gone silent, the lullabies turned to anguished weeping and wails of grief. Hurrying out of town as they were forced to do, they most likely never knew of the carnage that followed their departure. Mary’s tears of grief would come, but not for many years.
In the midst of our Christmas festivities it’s very easy to gloss over such a remembrance; after all, who wants to think about something that grim and violent during this all-too-brief celebratory period? But glossing over it denies both the necessity of the Incarnation that we celebrate in this season, and the power of the gospel that the Incarnate One was sent to proclaim.
You are all surely aware that this year’s holiday octave was rife with reports of horrible acts of war in the Gaza strip, as Israel and the Palestinians go at it once again, leaving hundreds dead, many of them ‘innocents’; less headline worthy but just as terrifying were reports out of the Democratic Republic of Congo of savage attacks on a congregation in a Roman Catholic church whose victims were primarily women, children, and elderly.
The heirs of King Herod stretch back to Pharaoh and forward throughout history into our own century: Hitler and Pol Pot; Slobodan Milosevic and David Karesh; drug dealers and crime lords in our own cities whose greed and lust for power turn innocent children and youth into both victims and perpetrators. These acts of mass violence, many of them genocide, cost the lives of millions of ‘innocents’ and turn parents around the globe into modern-day Rachel.
In a little while, during communion, we will sing one of only two hymns in our hymnal dedicated to the feast of the Holy Innocents, the very familiar “Coventry Carol”. The other hymn precedes that one; here is the third stanza, text by Rosamund Herklots:
Still rage the fires of hate today, and innocents the price must pay,
While aching hearts in every land cry out “We cannot understand!”
Is it true that we cannot understand, or simply that we refuse to do so? If we do, how can we continue to let it happen? The voices of innocents slaughtered in the medieval Crusades and in contemporary mercenary armies; in Armenia and in Nazi concentration camps; in Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, the Congo; in Iraq and Afghanistan; in Waco, Texas and on the streets and playgrounds and back alleys of America’s streets beg us not only to understand, but to act.
Do we lack the collective moral courage to be outraged? I don’t think so. But perhaps we are so overwhelmed and exhausted by it all that we just don’t believe there’s anything we can do to stop or to change Herod’s ongoing violent legacy.
Those of us who live in places safe from such horrible brutality can turn off CNN, put down the newspaper, or log off the internet and give thanks to God that our lives are not likely to entail such fear and suffering, but is merely giving thanks enough? I used to think so, but I don’t anymore.
I think that what we have never really understood, and still don’t get, is that true power does not lie in military might or economic control or political muscle or inordinate wealth. True power is found in those unlikeliest of sources: love, compassion, humility, generosity. The remainder of Herklots’ hymn goes like this:
Lord Jesus, through our night of loss shines out the wonder of your cross, the
love that cannot cease to bear our human anguish everywhere.
May that great love our lives control and conquer hate in every soul,
till, pledged to build and not destroy, we share your pain and find your joy.
In his New Year’s message, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams speaks of appreciating ‘the treasure that is our fellow human beings’. He was speaking primarily to the difference between human treasure and financial security in light of the global economic crisis, but the message could apply to anything that deflects our attention and intention away from the fact that Jesus came to save humanity and not political or economic or military systems, including the ones that might be labeled as ‘good’ or ‘upright’ or ‘virtuous’. Even the ‘good guys’ fail. Dr. Williams’ recommends we ask the following question of all of our personal, national, and global decisions: ‘Does this feel like something that looks after our real treasure, something that keeps our real wealth safe - the lives and welfare of the youngest and most vulnerable?’[1] It’s a question we must ask ourselves, and encourage others – our friends and family, our lawmakers, our governments, our agencies, our religious institutions – to keep asking as well.
We have put this brief but significant episode from Matthew’s gospel into historical and theological and scriptural perspective, but in the words of Church of England priest Joy Carroll Wallis, we need not only to keep Christ in Christmas; we need to keep Herod in Christmas as well. King Herod, too, serves as a reminder of the reason for the season, the fact that the ‘world God so loves’ was and still is badly in need of redemption. And I would add that the cross, as the instrument of salvation, belongs there, too. Those of us who follow the One who died on it are bound to proclaim and live out a gospel that has the power to overcome the evil that encompasses our world; that indeed is the only thing that can save it.